Thirty Years – 1922-1952
The Story of the Communist Movement in Canada

CHAPTER TWO: A Decade of Great Struggles

THE 1920's WAS A period of great militant working-class
struggles and, simultaneously, of cunningly engineered anti-working-class
schemes by which top trade union leaders sought
to transform the unions into part of the "efficiency" machinery
of the capitalist class. The Winnipeg General Strike had opened
up a period of widespread trade union struggles for wage
increases, union recognition and for the right of the workers to
establish unions of their own choice. The short-lived, immediate
post-war period came to a sudden end with the collapse
of the inflationary speculative boom at the end of 1920. The
year 1921 was one of crisis. The effect of the crisis was aggravated
for the working class by the veritable orgy of mergers and
over-capitalization that characterized the operations of finance-capital
during that period. The illustrations quoted below are
typical.

"Bearing in mind the very close relationship between the banks and
the industries of the country, it is interesting to note that during 1922-23-24,
5 of the 18 chartered banks in the Dominion suffered such
severe losses through the writing down of investment values as to
compel suspension or absorption; while the Union Bank, the fifth
largest in Canada, caused a considerable, flurry by transferring over
four and a half million dollars from its reserve to cover losses of the
same kind, and finally had to be absorbed by the Royal Bank."

"The Amalgamated Asbestos Corp. Ltd. started out with an original
capital of $3,550,000. They watered this by $14,450,000 which brought
the total paper value of their stock to $18,000,000. That meant that
dividends had to be raised for this $14,450,000 in addition to dividends
on the actual capital invested."

"Ames Holden-McCready Co. Ltd., at the time of their reorganization,
had a capitalization of $3,500,000. $8,000,000 of water was
poured into the original stock boosting their paper capitalization up to
$11,500,000."

"The Canada Steamship Lines Ltd., when organized by the merger
of a number of smaller companies, had a total capital of $16,200,000.
They turned the water hose into their stock bucket, and poured in
$16,800,000 worth of paper, boosting their paper capitalization up to
the enormous level Of $33,000,000."(1)

In the pulp and paper, mining, automobile, and general
manufacturing industries, the story was the same. A deep crisis
of over-capitalization and sharp contraction of markets beset
the entire capitalist system and threatened its beneficiaries with
breakdown. Canadian capitalists "dealt" with the crisis by
ruthless attacks on the living standards of the working class.
They sought to secure the same volume of profits from a lower
level of economic activity by more intense exploitation of those
workers who were fortunate enough to have jobs, and a highly
organized drive against the trade unions. Sparked by an
international conference of bankers held in Brussels, Belgium, the
manufacturers' associations of the United States and Canada
launched a systematic and violent "open-shop" drive. Their
proclaimed aim was to "reduce the cost of production." The
workers were militant, and resisted; but the reactionary top
officialdom of the unions refused to organize united labor opposition
to the bosses' open-shop and wage-cutting campaign.
Instead they sought to utilize the bosses' offensive to their own
advantage. Under the deceitful slogan "clean out the Reds,"
they launched a vicious campaign within the unions to consolidate
their own grip upon them. They expelled militant workers
right and left while changing union policies to conciliate the
bosses. Under the lying pretence that they were pursuing "the
higher strategy of labor," they transformed the unions from
organizations for working-class struggle into machinery for
anti-working-class collaboration with the bosses–in some industries
they made the unions the official agencies through which
the bosses enforced man-killing speed-up. The results were
disastrous for the workers. The workers in turn lost faith in the
international unions and deserted them in disgust. By the end
of 1925, their membership in Canada had been reduced to less
than a quarter of a million.

As noted earlier, trade union organization was limited, in
the main, to the "sheltered trades." The exceptions were coal
miners and railway workers. The mass industries–textiles,
packing, logging and sawmill workers, furniture workers,
general manufacturing, etc.–were unorganized. All the workers
suffered ruthless wage cuts and speed-up during that period,
including the well-organized railway shopmen and the militant
coal miners. Between 1920 and 1926 wages were cut by
an average of twenty-two per cent.

The bosses did not achieve their ends without bitter struggle
however. In industry after industry the workers fought back
against wage cuts. The strikes of the longshoremen in British
Columbia, longshoremen and shoe-workers in Quebec, miners
in Nova Scotia, Alberta, and British Columbia, metal trades
workers, printing trades workers and others in the Toronto
area, stopped the wage-cutting offensive far short of the
employers' objectives.

Because they were the best organized and the most militant,
the resistance of the coal miners to the wage-cutting campaign
exemplified the best of those struggles. In Alberta, for example,
the miners struck for seven months, from May 1, 1924, against
the demand of the Western Colliery Managers' Association for
a twenty-two per cent wage cut. The miners finally accepted a
ten per cent wage cut, returning to work at the end of the year.
Within two months of their return to work Philip Murray, on
behalf of the general executive board of the U.M.W.A., signed
the "Tri-State(2) Agreement" at Jacksonville, Florida, abolishing
the national wage-scale and opening the way for wage reductions
in the mining industry all over the United States and
Canada. The Western Colliery Managers' Association demanded
equivalent wage reductions, in the Alberta mines. With the
tacit agreement of the U.M.W.A. leadership they posted up
notices at the pit-heads announcing a further fifteen per cent
reduction. The miners fought those reductions. Against the
announced policy of the union leadership to supply the operators
with other miners if necessary, they struck the mines. The
Province of Alberta and the mining towns of eastern British
Columbia were torn with bitter struggles throughout 1925,
aggravated by the conflict between the overwhelming majority
of the rank-and-file miners who wanted to defeat the attempts
of the operators to reduce their standard of living, and the
official leadership of the U.M.W.A. which accepted the operators'
terms and collaborated with them in forcing the miners
back into the pits.

The odds against which militant workers had to fight during
that period, as well as the very high political level of many of
their trade union actions, were exemplified in the continual
struggles of the miners and steelworkers in Nova Scotia through
1920-1925. Indeed, their struggles marked the highest level
attained by Canadian trade union action up to that time.

Ownership of the province-wide coal mines and steel mills
and their ancillary operations had been merged in an octopus
named British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco). The miners
finally had compelled Besco to recognize their union, the
U.M.W.A., after more than ten years of struggle marked by
repeated police violence. At last, at the end of November, 1921,
the union won from the corporation a basic rate of $5.00 per
day for all workers employed underground. In January, 1922,
Besco cut the miners' wages again without so much as a
pretence at consultation with the union. During the following
eighteen months, while the miners' leaders strove doggedly to
compel the corporation to negotiate the miners' wage rate, the
corporation pressed its offensive against the steelworkers also,
combining victimization of active union men with systematic
chiselling on wage rates.

Steelworkers earnings had averaged $5.20 per day in 1920,
but by the spring of 1923 they were down to an average of
$4.15 a day. In addition to restoration of the 1920 wage level,
the workers were demanding a reduction of working hours.
At that time workers in production departments at the Sydney
steel plant worked a twelve-hour shift six days a week with the
night shift working a twenty-four-hour shift at the change-over
once every two weeks. The workers wanted an eight-hourday.
When the union submitted its demands in March, 1923, the
company made its rejection public, announcing that it aimed
to maintain the open shop; that there would be no check-off
of union dues, and no wage increases. The final result was
that on June 28, 1923, the union declared a strike. The
management of the plant announced the organization of a
"defence force" of 400 "faithful employees...armed with iron
bars." Armed forces of the state from Toronto and London,
Ontario, again invaded Cape Breton Island and the Nova Scotia
provincial government added its mounted provincial police.
There were 2,000 uniformed soldiers and policemen in the
town of Sydney in addition to the company's 400 goons–an
armed strike-breaker for every worker on strike.

A veritable reign of terror was launched in Sydney and the
adjacent mining towns. The office of the steelworkers' union
and the homes of its officers were raided daily. An officer
commanding mounted provincials ordered his men to ride into
a crowd of 1,000 people in and around a railway underpass on
the pretext that it was necessary to "clear the streets." Many
were injured, including women and children, some seriously.
The office of District 26 U.M.W.A. at Glace Bay Was raided,
as were the homes of officers of the miners' union. All these
raids were carried out by men in provincial policemen's
uniforms, without warrants, with complete disregard for elementary
decency, and in several cases with extreme brutality.

The miners of the Glace Bay area, assembled in a huge mass
meeting, and by unanimous vote, called upon their executive
officers to shut down every mine in the district if the troops and
the provincials were not withdrawn. In response to this meeting,
the executive officers met with representatives of the provincial
government, who would give no commitments about the withdrawal
of troops. Another mass meeting was held and a resolution
was adopted unanimously, calling upon all miners to leave
the pits by midnight of the following day. Every miner in the
Glace Bay area obeyed this rank-and-file decision. Following
that, the district officers issued a circular to the local unions
of the district describing the reasons for the stoppage and calling
upon all locals not yet on strike to call meetings immediately,
to decide upon action. Every local except one joined in that
movement.

Dan Livingstone, the president, and J. B. MacLachlan, the
secretary-treasurer of District 26, were arrested. J. B. MacLachlan
described his arrest afterward as a kidnapping. Besco, the
provincial government, the federal Department of Labor, and
the capitalist press carried on a co-ordinated campaign of propaganda
to the effect that the steel strike, the miners' sympathy
strike and all the violence in Nova Scotia were caused by
"foreign agitators." J. B. MacLachlan succeeded in getting bail
in spite of the strenuous opposition of the provincial government
and he advised the governor-general of Canada that: "If
the government will withdraw the troops, the miners will return
to the pits immediately." The governor-general declared
his intention to "advise" the provincial and federal governments
to withdraw their forces but, on that very day, the international
executive board of the U.M.W.A. revoked the charter
of District 26, removed its elected officers and appointed
representatives of the international president to administer the
district. The appointed officers ordered the miners back to the
pits. On August 1 the Amalgamated Steel Workers Union called
off the steelworkers' strike.

Defeat of the strike was followed by brutal prison sentences
for "unlawful assembly." Hundreds of the more active union
men were blacklisted. The Ukrainian community in Sydney
was reduced from several hundreds to a few dozens. Jim
MacLachlan was sentenced to two years' imprisonment on the
pretence that a letter sent out to the locals of the union had
contained seditious libel. The provincial government refused
to allow his trial to be held in Glace Bay where the alleged
offence was committed–it was held in Halifax.

The real reason for the arrest and imprisonment of Jim
MacLachlan was to remove him from the leadership of the
miners. He was released from Dorchester Penitentiary in
March, 1924, having served only four months of the two years.
Miners quit work to greet his return with great spontaneous
mass meetings which held up the train. At Glace Bay he was
met by a band and thousands of miners who paraded to the
theatre where he was welcomed home on behalf of the miners
and their families by the mayor, the deposed vice-president of
the union, the secretary of the steelworkers union, and by Tom
Bell, editor of the Maritime Labor Herald. But the
international commission remained in control of the union; the
miners were stripped of the militant leadership under which
they had fought so heroically for more than ten years to
establish. the U.M.W.A.

The struggles indicated by the above very sketchy description
exerted a very important influence upon the Workers'
Party, later the Communist Party, during the 1920's. From the
first wage cut imposed by the company in January, 1922, our
party was inextricably involved in all the series of great struggles
of the miners and steelworkers which continued without interruption
until the end of 1925. J. B. MacLachlan and most of
the fighting leadership of the miners throughout that period
were members of the party. J. B. and Tom Bell were members
of the party's Central Committee. All across Canada our party
spearheaded the battle for support to the embattled miners and
steelworkers, to help feed their children, provide legal defence,
to unite the workers around them. On Cape Breton Island the
periodic excuses used by the "provincials" for their violent
lawlessness was that they were "searching for Reds from
Toronto." The party was completely vindicated and rewarded
by the fact that, despite all the odds against them the miners
and steelworkers halted the offensive of the steel and coal
monopoly by their militant struggle.

The defeats suffered by the trade union movement, despite
heroic working-class militancy, spotlighted the decisive evil,
namely, that the organized workers were but a tiny minority of
the working class. As noted earlier, the aggregate membership
of all the unions, including the Catholic Syndicates and various
independent organizations, was reduced, by the combined effects
of the employers' open-shop drive and the policies of the
union leaders, to less than a quarter of a million by 1925.
Union membership was confined mainly to the "sheltered
trades." Except for the workers in the Sydney mill, the basic
steel industry was unorganized. Metal fabricating industries,
the logging and sawmill industry, automobile, meat-packing,
hard-rock mining, textile, aluminum, shipping, asbestos, etc.–the
industries in which the great majority of wage earners were
employed–were unorganized. Those industries could not be
organized on a craft union basis and the bureaucracy of the
international unions refused to organize industrial unions.
Indeed, they expelled members for even advocating industrial
unions. It was evident that the mass industries had to be
organized, but it was equally evident that the leaders of the
existing trade unions would not do it.

The 1924 national conference of the Trade Union Eductional
League pointed to that anomaly and its dire, consequences
for the Canadian working class. The conference called
upon supporters of the T.U.E.L. everywhere to combine, with
the "back-to-the-unions" campaign, movements to "organize
the unorganized."(3) The issue was taken up in regional
conferences of the T.U.E.L. in Ontario, Alberta and British
Columbia, and local industrial conferences were convened to
initiate organization.

The loggers were the first to get a functioning organization
established, starting in Ontario. Under the leadership of the
late Comrade Alf Hautamaki, the Lumberworkers Industrial
Union organized camp after camp. At the union's annual convention
in 1926 there were thirty-seven delegates, from locals
in the Thunder Bay, Algoma, and Hearst areas. The struggles
required to build the union were fierce. The lumber bosses
stopped at nothing. In October, 1929, two union organizers,
Comrades Rosvall and Voutilainen, were murdered in cold
blood. But blacklist and violence couldn't stop the union.
From modest beginnings made by hard-fighting Finnish
lumberjacks, the loggers of northern and northwestern Ontario,
built up through twenty-five years of struggle the splendid organization
that Hutchison, the president of the International
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, gutted in June, 1951.
The Pacific Coast loggers had built a powerful union during
and immediately following the First World War. The boss
loggers, aided by syndicalist confusion spread by the One Big
Union and the I.W.W., destroyed that union. As a result the
coast loggers got their organization drive under way somewhat
later than in Ontario. They, also from modest beginnings, built
a militant fighting union. Later, its president, Harold Pritchett,
was elected international president of the International Woodworkers
Association when the Canadian and U.S. unions merged.(4)

Organization of the hard-rock miners started with the Porcupine
Mineworkers Union (1925), which became part of the
Mine Workers Union of the W.U.L. and entered the International
Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in 1936.
Organization in the automobile industry was tough. No permanent
organization was achieved in the hundred per cent strike
at Oshawa in 1927. In the General Motors and Ford plants at
Oshawa and Windsor respectively the companies' system of anti-union
espionage seemed almost perfect. One after another,
union activists were fired and effectively blacklisted from the
industry. At last a constituent convention was organized at the
Prince George Hotel, Toronto. Delegates representing locals
(small and completely underground) in the General Motors
and the Ford automobile plants, and some feeder plants in
Toronto and St. Catharines, adopted a constitution and a
general platform of demands.

The Automobile Workers Industrial Union never achieved
bargaining strength however. In 1937 its small underground
local in Oshawa succeeded in combining the effects of its
propaganda activity with burning resentment against arbitrary
company action. Starting with the body department, the entire
plant was tied up. The possibility that the A.W.I.U. of Canada
might emerge as an open organization could not be allowed
to determine what tactics the small local should pursue.
Overcoming the reluctance of several of the comrades who had
worked so hard and risked so much to maintain their local
through the years of underground effort, the decision was made
to utilize the strike as a means of organizing all Canadian auto
workers in the United Auto Workers of America. After
convincing the Oshawa members, J. B. Salsberg, contacted Homer
Martin, then president of the U.A.W.A. Martin sent a
representative to Oshawa immediately. The strike became a U.A.W.
strike and the General Motors plant at Oshawa became a
union shop. Unionization of Windsor followed shortly afterwards.

In the steel industry, too, organization was extremely difficult
at first. Several local unions were established, but it was years
before a number of them were linked together in a functioning
union. In steel, also, the obstacle to unionization was the
unscrupulous activities of the employers, not lack of interest on
the part of the workers. For example, the workers of the
National Steel Car plant at Hamilton, Ontario, fought a major
strike for six weeks in 1928. That struggle illustrated both the
will of the workers to struggle and the fruit of the party's work
in developing youthful leadership. Harvey Murphy, then
twenty-two years of age, led that strike like a veteran. The
union had no treasury, the families of many of the workers
went hungry until a relief committee was organized and set to
work by a young comrade (Minnie Davis) then twenty years
of age.

Textile, furniture, packinghouse workers and others established
local unions, fought bitter strikes and learned invaluable
lessons. In the Estevan massacre, September 29, 1931, the
mounted police shot down peaceful miners as they were assembling
for a public strike meeting, killing three and wounding
thirteen. Then they hunted down Annie Buller, the miners'
guide and inspiration, and sentenced her to two years' imprisonment,
literally for the bloody massacre carried out by the
R.C.M.P. Troops and tanks patrolled the streets of Stratford,
Ontario, in a governmental attempt to intimidate workers.
Miners at Flin Flon and Noranda, textile workers in Quebec
and Ontario, needle trades workers in Toronto and Montreal,
packinghouse workers in Winnipeg, sawmill workers in British
Columbia–all defied government and employer violence and
organization went on.

As a direct result of the work of our party, the attitude of
revolutionary workers to the trade union movement was completely
changed before the end of the 1920's. The long-entrenched
idea that revolutionary workers should refuse to be
members of A.F.L. unions, that they should denounce craft
unions as "job trusts" and expend their energies in efforts to
build one or the other of the various "perfect-on-paper" revolutionary
unions, was completely discredited and rejected by all
revolutionary workers. In its place there was established
recognition of the fact that the place for militant workers was in
the unions which commanded the loyalty and support of the
overwhelming majority of the workers. The return of thousands
of militants had revitalized the craft-unions in many areas.
For the first time in history there were examples of craft
unions giving active assistance to the building of industrial
unions.

Much of what the party fought for in its battles for industrial
unionism and to organize the unorganized during the 1920's
has been achieved now: not always in exactly the way that we
then anticipated, but that is not the main consideration. The
idea of industrial unionism that the party implanted in the
minds and hearts of hundreds of thousands of workers became
the vital dynamic driving force of the later campaigns which
did establish industrial unions throughout the main industries
of Canada. In several industries the unions that were
established by the T.U.E.L. or the Workers' Unity League were
the organizational beginnings of what are now powerful C.I.O.
or A.F.L. unions.

(4)
It is noteworthy that Comrade Pritchett ceased to be international president
of the I.W.A. through action of the U.S. government–not by the will of
the membership. The U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow him to
perform the duties of his office in the United States.